Humanity or Being Human
by ReverendKilljoy
Summary: I really don't ship GrissomSara. Honest. And these stories come. The Hamlet quotes are real, as is the Bloom book. It's excellent. GSR NOTE: edited for numerous mechanical issues and one grammar correction.


Humanity, and Being Human

By Reverend Killjoy

1.

"You have print powder… a little…" Sara gestured towards Grissom's nose. "Or you have a coke habit you're just now letting me know about."

He looked at her, brows furrowing. "Print powder? Oh." He carefully wiped a tissue across his nose. He stopped, regarded the tissue, and frowned.

"Not print powder. Sugar." He shrugged. "There was pastry."

She grinned at him. "And you were weak?"

He took his glasses off to wipe them, and she took advantage of the opportunity to check out his eyes. After his voice, it was his eyes that had drawn her to him first. She realized she was staring and looked back down to her reports.

"Am I?" His voice sounded contemplative, almost wistful, even to him. "I don't know if I'm weak, for all the temptations in my life, or strong, for fighting them as well as I do."

She sighed and put her folder back down.

"Are we going to do this today?"

He leaned against the counter and looked at her through his newly cleaned lenses.

"Do what?"

She scowled. "You know, this." She gestured vaguely. "This, where you make cryptic comments about weakness and temptation, and vaguely suggest things might have been different except for something you won't explain. You know, this."

"Oh. That. Is that how you see me, Sara?"

"Stop! Stop answering every question with a question, stop deflecting. For once in your life, just talk to me. I'm sitting right here. Otherwise, go away and let me work. You make Hamlet look impetuous."

"I'm sorry."

"Me too." She flipped her report back open and pretended to read. Her jaw muscles worked and her shoulders were starting to ache. He moved past her and she closed her eyes, counting to ten, in French, to get a hold on her temper.

She heard a small sound, mechanical. For one second she recalled a vivid dream about being at the wrong end of a handgun, hearing the mechanism work. A frisson of chills worked up her spine towards the base of her brain, making her sit up, suddenly straight in her seat.

"Sorry." His voice was soft, softer than usual. It caressed the back of her neck and started a completely different sort of chill. "Locking the door."

She was afraid to turn around. Perhaps she'd fallen asleep over the tox report and this was all a very vivid, very lucid dream. She wanted to speak but could not find her voice.

"Hamlet. The melancholy Dane," he mused, moving to stand behind her. "Shakespeare tapped into so much of what it means to be human. Harold Bloom suggests in his book that Shakespeare's works actually shaped the formation of what we now think of as humanity."

"Why," she whispered, still afraid to break the moment, fragile as a soap bubble, between them, "why are you telling me this?"

"Hamlet was torn, balanced between the need for action and the fear of consequence."

His left hand came to rest on her left shoulder as he stood behind her. It was warm and soft, his sensitive fingers providing just enough pressure to stimulate but not so much as to invade or oppress. A small gasp escaped her lips, and she could feel her nipples contracting, tightening against the cotton of her bra.

"Remember Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Action." His right hand brushed along her right shoulder lightly. "Consequence." His hand withdrew, and his left gripped her slightly more firmly, as though holding her in her place. She could not have moved if she was on fire. Perhaps she was on fire, she wondered wildly for a moment. There was a fire in the lab, and this was the last fevered gift of an endorphin rush, and soon she would be dead.

"And not just his friends," Grissom continued, his voice a hypnotic monotone. "Ophelia. She was pure, chaste, and innocent. Her only sin was to love Hamlet."

He stroked the back of his hand across her cheek, so slowly as to be almost fetishistic. She wanted to lean into it, to capture his hand and hold it to her, but she could not. She was captivated, and until he released her she could no more move than she could rise up and fly.

"Hamlet loved her, too, and though he fought against it, his actions reached out, touched her, and destroyed her." His hand stopped, fingertips at her temple. "Passion destroys. Action destroys. Love… This is the lesson of Hamlet. Not the politics, not the indecision, not the intrigue. The lesson of Hamlet is that love destroys."

His hands left her, and she ached with loss. She mourned the loss of his touch as the newly blind mourn the night. She heard him, felt him, step back, and heard the small click of the door lock turning.

2.

Sara realized he was actually leaving. That was it? "Love destroys"?

She rose and turned, saw him, still at the door, head lowered, hand still on the lock. He was gathering himself, getting ready to leave- to walk away from her- again.

She reached out and put her hand over his, turned the knob and felt through his hand the lock sliding into place. He leaned forward and his forehead rested on the door. She stood behind him, bare centimeters from him but touching him nowhere but his hand.

"I'm not destroyed, Gris." Her voice, so harsh, so dry sounding in her own ears. She wanted to match his, to have that low hypnotic, wildly erotic hush that he had. Instead, she was just herself. "And if I were, it would be from my actions, not yours."

She leaned forward slightly, and suddenly her body was in contact with his. Her chin came to rest on his shoulder, her compact bosom flattened against his broad back. Her hips tilted slightly and she was pressed against his buttocks and his thigh. Her other hand came to his hip. She didn't grind or rub against him. She just let him feel her body. She felt him trembling, powerful, a little intimidating.

"You could get hurt, Gris. I know that scares you." She finally found the soft tone she'd been looking for, her lips brushing his ear as she spoke to him. The warmth flowed from his body to hers, feeding her recklessness.

"I could get hurt," she continued, "and I know that scares you too. But you aren't Hamlet. Not a king, not a prince, not the cause of all woe. You're a man, a good man, I think."

Her hand left his hip and ran slowly down his thigh as she let go. She rocked her hips back, breaking the contact along his back, till just the faint, maddening rubbing of her breasts across his shoulder blades, her hand on his and her chin on his shoulder kept them in touch. She felt him gasp, though she did not hear it, as the connection was broken.

"You're a good man," she repeated, "and if I'm ever going to have my heart broken, to be destroyed, the only one I trust to do it honestly is you."

She lifted her chin from his shoulder, and stepped to one side, now touching him only at his hand upon the door lock. She looked at her hand, over his, and felt his pulse beneath her fingers.

"If I'm to be broken, break me. If we're going to be destroyed, let's get started. But don't you dare, don't you ever dare, pretend that you're protecting me from you."

She turned the lock, heard it click, and let her hand drop. She stood, still close, still feeling the warmth of him in the air between them. She braced herself, waiting for him to go.

"If Ophelia hadn't loved Hamlet she might have lived," she said whistfully. "But what kind of life is that?"

3.

He still did not look at her. Instead, he stood, hand still on the door lock, flesh still alive from her touch. He found his voice before he trusted himself to look her in the eye.

"I didn't know you cared much for Shakespeare," he said softly.

"I didn't," she admitted, "but I knew you did, and I do care very much for you."

"Do you?" He hung his head. "Sometimes it seems so obvious, so right. And then I analyze and over think, and I wonder how anything so beautiful as you could ever fit into my life."

"Doubts. Hamlet, again." She closed her eyes and recited softly, "'Doubt the stars are fire.'"

He opened his eyes and raised his head. "'Doubt that the sun doth move,'" he quoted back to her.

She saw him turn slowly, almost reverently towards her. His eyes were shining, and his unshed tears caught the light like diamonds.

"'Doubt truth to be a liar,'" she answered, reaching out to cradle his face in the palm of her hand. Her own tears wet her cheeks and she knew this was it, the moment, and what happened next would steer the course of her heart for another decade.

"'But never,'" he finished the quote, "'doubt I love.' Act two, scene two. I don't doubt you, Sara. I believe in you. It's myself I worry about."

"I believe in you, Gris. Shouldn't that be enough?" She leaned forwards as if to kiss him, but at the last moment she closed her eyes and rested her head against his, savoring the touch, willing him to be hers. "Isn't that enough?"

"Not quite," he said at last, and before her heart could break at the words, he lifted her chin in his hands and brushed his lips across hers. "Is that enough?"

She tilted her head, and he likewise, and their lips met again, more firmly.

"No," she whispered fiercely. "Not enough."

Her hands reached around to clasp behind his head, her fingertips dragging through his short hair and her trimmed nails raking across the nape of his neck. She kissed him harder, urgent, unafraid to admit the passion she had carried inside for so long.

"Is that enough?" She gasped the words into him, their kisses hot and breathless. His arms surrounded her and his hands roamed across her back, pulling them together.

"No," he cried, his voice breaking and raw, his lips and teeth and tongue working with hers, frantic and alive and chaos without design. "Not nearly enough."

She had backed up, swept along by his passion and her need, and the backs of her thighs collided with the lab bench. He flailed behind her with one hand, sliding her journals and her reports to the side. Some slid from the table, others spilled across it in a riot of charts and verbiage.

He reached with his delicate, sensitive hands, his subtle tools of inquiry, his precise instruments, he reached underneath her and lifted her onto the bench. She gasped and answered his feral growl with a low keening moan as her legs spread and wrapped around his hips.

"Is that enough?" he begged of her, their teeth grating and their hearts pounding as he leaned into her and she pulled him closer still.

She pushed back, pushed with both hands flat against his chest until their lips were separated. She caught his eye, saw the need and the desire, saw her own lust and longing mirrored there at last.

"It's never enough." She kissed him lightly and pulled back before they both gave in to the temptation to make it more. Her eyes suddenly grew wide and her flushed face began to pale. "We have a problem!"

His brows furrowed and his mouth took on a grim set. "What is it? What is it, honey? I'll fix it, we'll fix it, what is it?"

She tried very hard not to laugh. "We've only been on for an hour and a half. How the hell are we going to survive till the end of the shift?"

He rocked back on his heels, obviously shocked.

"We're at work." He suddenly looked down, and noted the obvious tent in his khakis. "We may have a problem."

She laughed, a low throaty chuckle that rumbled and echoed and built towards a full-body laugh.

He admired how amazing she looked, how much more free and lovely she was with a laugh than with other expressions he had put on her face in the past. As her body shook with laughs that were rapidly moving towards giggles, she passed tremors of mirth on to him at the spots where their bodies were still pressed together.

"Okay," he said with asperity, pushing farther back, "that's not very helpful."

She nodded, but the look of pained seriousness on his face, combined with the ruffled mess of his hair, the partially untucked shirt, the slightly askew glasses… She couldn't help it. She dissolved into a fit of giggles and slid slowly over, toppling into the piles of papers on the bench.

"I suppose we could just leave the door locked and hope no one comes by," he considered, grinning as he took off his glasses to wipe them clean again. She was trying to sit up, holding her sides and gasping for air between giggles. When he caught her eye, he waggled his eyebrows and winked, a sly grin bisecting his round face as he moved closer to her, as if to kiss her again.

She whooped with laughter, and put her hands over her mouth with shock at the sound of it. She shook her head rapidly from side to side and squeezed her eyes closed, willing him to stop doing that so she could stop laughing like a giddy schoolgirl. That just made it worse and she fell back over laughing.

Epilogue.

"That's Sara?" Nick was looking at the locked door in slack-jawed amazement. "And Grissom?"

Catherine nodded, face pale and looking somewhere between shocked and ill.

"And they've been in there, with the door locked," he whispered as though they could hear him, as though anyone could have heard anything through the hooting laughter that regularly came through the solid door, combined with other sounds of, of, well, he dared not speculate what.

"For over an hour," she completed his sentence. She shook herself like a dog coming out of a pond. "Okay, we should, um, we should get back to work."

"But I need my tox report from in there," Nick said softly, frowning at the door.

"Well, you can wait if you want, but do you really want to be the first one in there when the door is unlocked?"

He looked at her, his boyish face comically alarmed.

"I'm going to the DNA lab," he said with sudden resolve. "Maybe till shift is over."

"I'll come with," she said, nodding eagerly as they hurried down the hall.


End file.
